I was doing some cleaning this weekend, during which I came across an unfinished quilt that my great-grandmother, my maternal grandmother’s mother, had made. She had sewn every stitch by hand, and the fabric came from her housedresses, which became children’s clothes, which then became potholders and towels and quilts.
Coming across that quilt top got me thinking of Baboosha. She was from Poland and had never learned English, yet raised nine children (at least one of whom was killed in the Flu Pandemic) largely on her own after her husband left her. She had come over to the US with her brother at the age of 12 or so, and went to work for a wealthy Russian family doing cooking and housework. They settled in Pennsylvania coal country, and as far as I know, her brother went to work in the coal mines. She herself married a Polish-American who worked for the railroad (he had had pneumonia as a child and couldn’t work in the mines). From what I could piece together from my grandmother, he was controlling and abusive, and mocked her for her inability to speak English. And then he left, going off and starting another family somewhere else on the train route. But his family still lived in Hazelton, and threatened periodically to take Baboosha’s children away.
She eventually got the last laugh when, after years of struggle bringing up her children on her own, he died and she was awarded the widow’s pension from the railroad. He had never bothered to divorce her, and the railroad accordingly didn’t have his new family on the books.
She’s the great-grandparent I know most about, and the only one I met (she was a little terrifying, what with her being very, very old and not being able to communicate with her). But my mother’s father’s mother was also a strong character. My grandfather didn’t talk much about his family, but his father was the second son of a landed Irish family, which meant he got nothing. So he packed up his family and moved to the US, where they were as poor as they were in Ireland, but with more opportunities. My great-grandmother lined up all of her children and told them what they were going to do with their lives, and how that was going to be accomplished. I doubt my grandfather had any burning ambition to be a dentist, or his brother a doctor, or his sister a lawyer, but that’s what their mother had decided they were going to do, and she was not the kind of woman to be questioned. So the whole family worked to put each other through college and graduate school (my grandfather at one point delivering milk in a horse-drawn wagon and getting yelled at by Thomas Edison to get the goddamn horse off his lawn), and each succeeded in their fields.
I know even less about my father’s grandmothers, though I have heard tantalizing bits about my extremely uptight grandfather’s mother being the kind of free spirit who smoked when it was shocking for women to do so and who wore lots of bangles. Grams’ mother I know nothing about.
Tell us about your great-grandmothers in comments.